Wandering Thoughts

By its nature, anarchist theory is a vagabond theory, light of step,
always on the move. The reason is simple. Reality is not a static
thing, but a play of phenomena in which every individual is actively
immersed. Entrenchment of positions makes no real sense, but traps the
anarchist in the bogs of ideology and militancy. For this reason,
anarchist theoretical endeavors go their farthest when they are taken
lightly and playfully, as explorations, experiments and adventures, not
tasks or duties. What appears here is done in that spirit. Some of it I
wrote years ago, and no longer necessarily agree with, but I think it
has a certain challenge, a certain bite to it.

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Paths to Self-Creation

Self as Relationship and Project

I have certainly found it useful, even necessary, to explore what is
inside myself, to dig a maze of tunnels into my interior in order to
discover what is there for creating my life and world. But it does no
good to get lost inside myself. Then the very purpose for
self-exploration is undermined, because I lose the most essential tools
for that exploration. Inner exploration can only be meaningful when it
is carried out hand-in-hand with concrete exploration of the external
world with the explicit aim of creating one’s life. I am talking here
about practical activity such as building or finding shelter; getting
food, clothing, tools and other necessities; destroying enemies and
harmful elements that threaten my life; developing relationships of
complicity, affinity and mutuality, love and friendship. In other
words, learning how to bring together the tools, relationships, time
and space necessary to create what I desire. My uniqueness lies in the
fact that I am a particular web of relationships with everything that
surrounds me. By grasping the various threads that make up this web and
weaving them in specific ways, I become the creator of my life, and
this is how I come to know myself. But precisely because this is a
question of relationships with other unique beings striving to create
their own lives, this is a project that is never completed, a
continuing struggle to get beyond my present limits.

One of the
necessary tools for this project is abstraction. This is the ability to
draw broad, general ideas from specific situations and relationships,
ideas that can then be applied to new situations and relationships.
Without the ability to create abstract concepts (such as “food”,
“heat”, “cold”, “pain”, etc.), we would confront the world at every
moment as an infant, never learning to recognize what those things we
interact with might mean to us and thus never even beginning the
project of self-creation. But when self-exploration turns into a
self-indulgent plunge into an interior separated from any concrete
external projects, the necessary task of abstraction loses its link to
the world and wanders into ethereal realms, perhaps of madness, perhaps
of intellectual absurdity disguising itself as profundity. In my
opinion, a great deal of present-day “critical theory”, particularly
the sort that comes out of academia, is precisely this sort of
intellectual absurdity. Consider these two problems that are frequently
brought up within academic circles:

How do we know what we know? Can we truly know anything?

Does the individual really exist? Is individuality a meaningful concept?

By leaving these questions in these general abstract forms (or giving
them a gloss of false concreteness by addressing them in terms of broad
political categories – like the categories of identity politics or the
idea of the West – that are themselves abstractions), they can be
endlessly debated in a way guaranteed to offer nothing useful. The only
people likely to find any interest in these discussions are those who
like to lose themselves in theoretical labyrinths separated from the
concrete realities of life.

But if we make these questions
truly concrete, it changes things completely. For example, let’s ask:
“How do we know what we know about building a house? Can we truly know
anything about building a house?” All of the sudden, everything is so
clear. I come to know what I know about building a house by bringing
together people who can teach and aid me, gathering tools and materials
necessary for accomplishing the task, and doing it. Once I have
successfully built a house, I can say that I truly know how to build a
house.

It’s a bit trickier to make the idea of individuality
concrete. It isn’t enough to merely rephrase the problem in this way:
“Do I exist?” Because this “I” can be conceived of as a pure
abstraction, completely separated from the world, a crystallized ideal
standing above all relationship. This would leave us in the same
quandary as the earlier wording. We would still be left in a labyrinth
of pure abstraction without escape.

We can bring the problem of
individuality into the concrete world precisely by talking in terms of
our relationships with the world, in other words by asking questions
like: “Am I picking up this hammer? Am I reading this book? Am I
attacking this institution? Am I talking with my friend? Am I writing
these words?” Made concrete in this way, the absurdity of the original
question is exposed. Since existence is simply the interweaving
relationships of individuals acting upon and with each other, of course
individuals exist. The concept of existence and that of the individual
are meaningless without each other. Since I pick up hammers, read
books, attack institutions, talk with friends and write words, since I
relate with and act upon the web of relationships that is existence, I
exist. And since I do so in a way that is specific to the threads that
weave together to form my life, I am a unique individual in
relationship with other unique individuals.